http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com --
IN his impressive new book, Coloring the News, journalist William
McGowan has an unusual take on the continuing battle over bias in the
news media: He thinks liberals are as damaged by it as everyone else.
Bill Clinton, he points out, was victimized in a sense by the early
nonreporting of the gays-in-the-military issue.

Because the newsroom
strongly supported gay causes, journalists didn't bother to do much
reporting on the depth of the opposition building against Clinton's pledge
to allow openly gay members of the armed forces. The debate was
skewed, and Clinton paid a high political price, because reporters
thought open inclusion of gays was too obvious a cause to cover in any
detail.

The same yawn
of obviousness
surrounds
newsroom
treatment of
affirmative
action. One New
York Times
reporter told
McGowan, "No
one wants to do
a story on
affirmative action
because they
just don't see
anything wrong
with it." In the
papers I read,
coverage is slack. When articles do appear, reports that put race and
gender preferences in a good light are much more common than
discouraging news. The newsroom air is so thick with orthodoxy that it
is very hard for readers and viewers to figure out what is really going on.
The best recourse is to get on the Internet and check things out
yourself.

McGowan argues, in case-by-case detail, that diversity ideology has
corrupted the newsroom. Hiring more women, gays, and minorities was
fair, but it pushed the newsroom further to the left, since those groups
are more liberal than white males. These groups acquired the ability to
monitor coverage of their own activities, often with the ability to airbrush
out anything they considered negative or hurtful to the cause.

Militant
gays took over AIDS beats, often with little or no protest about a conflict
of interest. Office commissars began to appear-"senior vice president,
diversity" or "diversity director"-who sometimes sat in on daily news
meetings and contributed to coverage decisions. (Just as a teacher or
someone from the principal's office used to sit in and contribute to
coverage of your high school paper.) Managers were brought in line by
linking their promotions and bonuses to the number of minority
journalists they hire, retain, and promote. A clever move.

For quelling
resistance to a dubious new order, there is nothing like offering a
financial stake to managers and mentioning the possibility of their
careers being ended. "Diversity was the new religion," McGowan writes.
The faithful fell in line.

Ingrained assumptions about the awfulness of the "dominant" (i.e., white
male) culture began to flow into coverage. Standard lines for coverage
emerged. Assimilation and integration are bad. Open immigration and
bilingual programs are good. Women and blacks have made little
progress against institutionalized oppression. Religion is dangerous,
except when the churches accept diversity ideology. The script on gays
and feminists, McGowan writes, "tends to depict any objections to their
causes-however well grounded in constitutional, moral, or institutional
traditions-as outright bigotry, worthy of cartoonish portrayal."

Signed off. Worst of all, the mostly white male bosses raised no
objections as minority journalist associations became more and more
political, taking explicit stands on issues and holding workshops on how
to spin coverage of those issues. Presumably if a Christian
fundamentalist caucus should appear in a newsroom (consider this
unlikely) and work to turn news coverage against abortion and in favor of
school prayer, their editors might think of objecting. But not to a racial
version of the same thing.

A couple of years ago at a conference of the PC-afflicted American
Society of Newspaper Editors, the society's "credibility project" showed
a film to help explain why readers increasingly don't believe newspapers.
The film dealt with a mother's complaint that her son scored two
touchdowns in a high school football game, but the local paper attributed
the touchdowns to a teammate. And I thought: Is it possible to be more
out of touch with reality? Newspapers' dramatic loss of credibility has
little to do with faulty details at sports events or other minor
carelessness. As surveys show, readers are stampeding away because
they are alienated by diversity-skewed reporting. Speaking about the
newsroom's "disconnect from the rest of mainstream society,"
McGowan writes: "Much of the American public has the sense that
news organizations have a view of reality at odds with their own and that
reporting and commentary come from some kind of parallel universe."
The diversity revolution was supposed to increase readership and
enhance credibility.

Just the opposite has resulted. How long will it take
the business to figure this
out?